7
Challenges of the Current System

A panel of experts discussed some of the major challenges to the current system of oral health care. These challenges include education and training challenges, regulatory challenges, financial challenges, and challenges in performing quality assessment.

CREATING FUTURE LEADERS

Jack Dillenberg, D.D.S., M.P.H.

Arizona School of Dentistry & Oral Health

Many critical challenges face the dental workforce. The practice of dentistry is a privilege that includes an underlying responsibility and expectation to give back to society. To quote from the report of the American Dental Education Association President’s Commission:

Economic market forces, societal pressures, and professional self-interest must not compromise the contract of the oral health provider with society. (Haden et al., 2003)

Societal Changes

Many changes affect the way the health care workforce interacts with society. Today, the public is increasingly well-informed about their health care choices, and so professionals need to be aware of the types of information the public has access to, including incorrect information. In addition,

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The U.S. Oral Health Workforce in the Coming Decade: Workshop Summary.
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7
Challenges of the Current System
A panel of experts discussed some of the major challenges to the current
system of oral health care. These challenges include education and training
challenges, regulatory challenges, financial challenges, and challenges in
performing quality assessment.
CREATING FUTURE LEADERS
Jack Dillenberg, D.D.S., M.P.H.
Arizona School of Dentistry & Oral Health
Many critical challenges face the dental workforce. The practice of den-
tistry is a privilege that includes an underlying responsibility and expecta-
tion to give back to society. To quote from the report of the American
Dental Education Association President’s Commission:
Economic market forces, societal pressures, and professional self-interest
must not compromise the contract of the oral health provider with society.
(Haden et al., 2003)
Societal Changes
Many changes affect the way the health care workforce interacts with
society. Today, the public is increasingly well-informed about their health
care choices, and so professionals need to be aware of the types of informa-
tion the public has access to, including incorrect information. In addition,

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4 THE U.S. ORAL HEALTH WORKFORCE
today’s patients are different in that they want to have more active roles
in their own health care. Therefore, everyone (e.g., health care executives,
health professionals, legislators, policy makers, and the public) needs to
work together to be more responsive to the demands of this well-informed
and engaged society. Strong leaders who are humble, compassionate, and
confident are especially needed.
This nation is currently undergoing a paradigm shift from primary
care to comprehensive care to interdisciplinary care. The focus needs to be
on overall health, not just specific disciplines, in order to provide systemic
disease prevention and management and to engage patients in healthier
behaviors. In that vein, “health homes” should be considered (instead of
medical homes or dental homes). Currently, the oral cavity is separated
from the rest of the body in many ways, including in the insurance system.
Health homes that are accessible, continuous, comprehensive, and family
centered are needed. There is more to dentistry than fixing teeth; the whole
person must be seen in the context of his or her family and community.
The Arizona School of Dentistry & Oral Health
To address all of these challenges, special consideration is warranted
for the recruitment of the next generation of dental students. The Arizona
School of Dentistry & Oral Health (ASDOH) focuses on training dental
students to become community-based educational leaders for populations
in need. In that regard, the school officials think differently about the types
of students to accept, looking for students who want to make a difference
and are from diverse backgrounds. For example, one of the main criteria of
admission is the documented demonstration of previous community service.
ASDOH also has the highest number of American Indian dental students in
any dental school in the United States.
The modular curriculum allows time for further community service.
Grant funding secured the building of a special care clinic that has become
the largest provider of special care dentistry in the Southwest. The program
has other nontraditional elements. For example, in lieu of a permanent sci-
ence faculty, renowned educators from around the country come to teach
in 1-week modules. There are also a lot of clinics, and in their fourth year,
students spend half of their time outside the school including 4 weeks work-
ing in sites across the country such as community health settings and Indian
Health Service clinics. One-third of the first graduating class and about
one-fourth of the second class went to work in community health centers.
Finally, every student graduates with a certificate in public health, which is
a requirement for graduation. Students can take additional courses online
to receive a full master’s of public health (MPH) degree. About one-third
of the class graduating in 2010 will receive an MPH degree.

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CHALLENGES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM
The school also has a few unique programs for recruitment of students
and placement of graduates. For example, the school reserves dental school
spots for students recommended by the Alabama Medical Foundation.
Additionally, in an agreement with the National Association of Community
Health Centers, the Hometown Project allows community health centers to
identify students they want to prioritize for job interviews.
Conclusions
To create the leaders of tomorrow, new and creative thinking is needed
when considering the types of students to recruit into dental schools and
how to train them. ASDOH works hard to create scholarships so that stu-
dents with commitment to communities in need can be trained to go back to
those areas. All oral health professionals in the future need to be educated
and trained to provide patient-centered, family-centered, comprehensive,
and coordinated care.
Discussion
One participant raised the issue of the trend toward dental schools
not being part of larger academic health centers and wondered where the
future evidence will come from in an era of evidence-based dental practice.
In response, Dillenberg noted that ASDOH has collaborative agreements
with universities around the country and fosters research experiences for
interested students. Dillenberg expressed that regionalizing dental educa-
tion through collaborative agreements is especially useful with the faculty
shortages seen at many dental schools.
REGULATORY CHALLENGES
Regulatory Challenges in Health Care
Catherine Dower, J.D.
Uniersity of California, San Francisco,
Center for Health Professions
The following discussion of the regulatory challenges is addressed to
the health professions in general.
Challenges
In the United States, the regulation of health professions can impede
the delivery of health care services because of three main challenges. First,

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THE U.S. ORAL HEALTH WORKFORCE
while the education, training, and testing of most health care professionals
and the accreditation of educational programs have national standards,
the establishment of scope of practice laws are state-based and politically
driven processes that result in wide variability and unnecessary limitations
on professional practice. One example of the mismatch between what pro-
fessionals are trained to do and what they are legally permitted to do is the
variability in state laws regarding nurse practitioners. State laws vary tre-
mendously regarding whether nurse practitioners can work independently
despite the fact that there is no evidence indicating that nurse practitioners
do better with physician supervision. There is a similar divergence of prac-
tice laws and lack of evidence about patient outcomes when it comes to
nurse practitioners’ prescription authority. In fact, research now shows that
expanded and overlapping scopes of practice are correlated with increased
access without compromised quality or safety.
A second challenge in the regulation of health professions is that there
are inherent conflicts of interest both with the regulatory oversight of one
profession by another profession (as with dentistry and dental hygiene) as
well as when a profession self-regulates—that is, when the state regulatory
boards are composed primarily of the members of the profession that they
are regulating. The state has a legitimate interest in protecting the public,
which is the only reason you can interfere with an individual’s ability to
practice his or her profession. There is self-interest when a profession is
regulating itself, and every year state boards are accused of serving their
professions rather than serving the public. However, when two professions
are at odds with each other over scope of practice, the issues become more
complex. The inherent conflict of interest between protecting self-interests
of a profession and protecting the public is exacerbated when one profes-
sion regulates another. In these cases, the dominant profession may likely
have an additional conflict of interest in trying to protect its own scope
of practice, putting itself at odds with both the other profession and the
public. While society may choose for now to live with the unavoidable
conflict within self-regulating professions, it can avoid the additional con-
flicts of one profession regulating another by permitting each profession to
regulate only itself.
A third challenge in the regulation in health care professionals is that
health workforce data collection is limited or nonexistent in most states.
For example, little is known about how many professionals are practic-
ing or where they are located. While state boards collect some data on
licensees, they are quite limited. Short surveys could be tied to the events
of initial licensure or relicensure and would provide useful comparison
and trend data, such as practice status (e.g., in clinical practice, adminis-
tration, academia), location of practice, and specialty. These data would
help to inform many key workforce decisions (such as the need for new

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CHALLENGES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM
professional schools) and to better identify true health professional short-
age areas.
Promising Directions
While these challenges are serious, some promising advances show an
increased reliance on evidence and data for regulatory decisions. For exam-
ple, new state-based models for deciding scope of practice laws have arisen
whereby separate advisory committees review all the submitted evidence
(both by the profession proposing an extension of scope and the profession
opposing that expansion). These committees then submit their recommen-
dations to the state legislatures, which still hold ultimate authority regard-
ing practice acts. These new types of review committees have several factors
that contribute to their success including having an advisory-only status,
credibility, a patient-focused approach, efficiency, and evidence-based deci-
sion making. For example, Figure 7-1 shows an evidence-based pyramid
being developed by the University of California, San Francisco, that could
be used to prioritize different types of evidence submitted to these com-
mittees. As one moves up the pyramid, the evidence has a higher degree of
filtering (i.e., it is reviewed by more people) and the quality of the evidence
Meta -
analyses
Controlled
De
e
trials
nc
g
ide
re
Demonstrations
e
Ev
of
Research studies
of
Fi
Government data,
lte
lity
Office of Inspector General reports
rin
a
Qu
g
State laws and regulations
Educational curricula, accreditation standards
Survey articles, state studies
Expert opinion, opinion pieces, anecdotes
FIGURE 7-1 Pyramid to prioritize evidence.
SOURCE: Reprinted, with permission, from Catherine Dower, 2009. Copyright
2008 by University of California, San Francisco Center for the Health Professions.

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8 THE U.S. ORAL HEALTH WORKFORCE
increases. However, there is a lesser amount of this type of high-quality,
highly-filtered evidence.
There are also trends toward more independent regulatory boards (i.e.,
less of one profession regulating another profession), increased standardiza-
tion of administrative functions among the boards, and more coordinated
oversight of regulatory boards within each state. To address the lack of
health workforce data, three promising directions for data collection are
important to note: short surveys can be tied to relicensure; online data
collection and management makes most economic and research sense; and
standards across professions and across states would be most valuable and
provide the most useful comparison and trend data.
Competition and Consumer Protection
Gusta P. Chiarello, J.D., M.P.P.
Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is charged with preventing unfair
methods of competition and unfair and deceptive acts or practices in or
affecting commerce (15 U.S.C. §45) including the enforcement of antitrust
laws and other basic consumer protection laws. As a general concept, com-
petition in any industry spurs innovation, lower prices, and higher quality,
but competition should not create an unequal balance of power or occur
through improper means. In the United States, professions are subject to
laws and regulations, such as who may enter a profession, what types of
minimal competency requirements must be satisfied for licensure, and what
services they may provide. State legislators and professional boards often
ask the FTC to consider these and other regulations (e.g., rules on advertis-
ing for professions). Aside from these issues, the FTC also does a significant
amount of work for consumer protection related to fraud in advertising,
especially false claims of the health benefit of products.
Both the FTC and the Department of Justice advocate against the acts
of professions that limit or prevent competition for the delivery of health
care services by another profession (e.g., scope of practice laws or licen-
sure restrictions) without providing countervailing consumer benefit. That
is, if the provision of simpler services is restricted to more highly trained
professions, demand will increase, prices will rise, and access will decrease.
Therefore, a good reason must exist as to why competition is constrained
in a particular area of practice.
1 Mr. Chiarello noted that his comments were his own and did not reflect the views of the
Federal Trade Commission or any individual commissioner.

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CHALLENGES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM
As the FTC often does not have institutional expertise in specific profes-
sions, it provides guidance but leaves ultimate decision making to legisla-
tors and others to determine proper constraints on competition. The FTC
suggests a four-part test for legislators to use in assessing their regulations.
First is whether the regulation restricts competition. In the case of scopes
of practice, this will likely be true since there will always be individuals
just outside a specific scope of practice. Second is whether the restriction
benefits consumers in a way that would not exist if not for the regulation.
This often relates to consumer safety in that the restriction might prevent
incompetent individuals from providing services. Third is consideration
of the costs versus benefit to the consumer. That is, would the consumer
gain more if restrictions were removed, such as through increased provider
access. Finally, is the consideration of whether there is a less restrictive
way to achieve the same goal. For example, is foreclosing competition to
a certain group of professionals less or more restrictive than changing the
competency requirements of that profession? These decisions should be
based on evidence, including the opinions of the consumers themselves.
Recently, the FTC has been involved in advocacy for such areas as
limited-service clinics and the requirement to hire attorneys for real estate
closings. In both cases, the FTC argued to find alternative solutions to
proposed or existing regulations so competition would not be hindered.
Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, the FTC was involved in advocacy
directly related to oral health. These cases related to scope of practice and
advertising issues. For example, the South Carolina legislature expanded
the scope of practice of hygienists to allow cleanings to be provided in
school settings without the direct presence of a dentist. The state board
of dentistry passed an emergency regulation in opposition to this, and the
FTC subsequently brought an antitrust action against the board for reasons
of unfair competition that would lead to the loss of preventive services for
thousands of children.
FINANCING CHALLENGES
Craig W. Amundson, D.D.S.
HealthPartners
Multiple challenges exist in the financing of oral health care in the
United States. One such challenge is the budget crisis at the state level.
Many states struggle to meet their budgets, and dental benefits are in-
creasingly becoming optional for many people. A second major challenge
relates to the cost of dental care. Dental care is very expensive, and if ar-
rayed against specialty areas of medical care it would be one of the most
expensive areas of care. At the same time, compared to some other medical

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0 THE U.S. ORAL HEALTH WORKFORCE
specialties, very little has been done to decrease these costs by targeting ef-
fective preventive and disease management measures that might mitigate the
need for high-cost services. In the commercial world of health care, large
amounts of money are at risk if patients have complications; for example,
if diabetic patients do not control their disease well, they will likely incur
large costs due to hospitalization and other services. However, in dentistry,
most employers have a very limited benefit, so they don’t have as much
vested interest to become engaged in oral health disease management. An-
other challenge is that the dental inflation rate exceeds the inflation rate
for most other aspects of society, which can make negotiation difficult. In
fact, in 2008, dentistry was identified as the industry with the highest profit
margin (almost 17 percent) (Triangle Business Journal, 2009).
Strategies
The health care system can be envisioned as having four components:
health promotion, care delivery, administration, and financing. The key to
success is how well we integrate across those four areas. In the dental eco-
nomic model, there is no association between the health care strategies and
financing strategies. The first step to overcoming financing challenges is to
craft a care strategy that is supported by the financing system, rather than
just adjusting the financing system in a piecemeal manner. For example,
one strategy is to think about population health and the health continuum,
including the range of risk status and level of clinical intervention needed
at each stage (see Figure 7-2).
The dental benefit industry and dental professionals tend to focus on
clinical procedures, namely, treatment and salvage interventions, rather
than focusing on identification of risk or prevention. In addition, the dental
office system is often poorly equipped to efficiently deliver the advice and
lifestyle-changing education needed to reduce patient risk for oral health
disease. More collaboration is needed with individuals who are more expe-
rienced with changing health behaviors.
Within the world of finance, several strategies are worthy of explora-
tion to address these challenges. First is to think broadly about care model
design and redesign instead of focusing strictly on access to the current
system that often fails to meet patient’s needs. Second is to understand the
importance of allocating resources to public health disease management
and disease risk-reduction strategies as a financing activity independent of
invasive dental care. Another strategy is to look for alternative activity-
based financing systems for specific dental care that gets away from the
perverse incentives that are built into the current fee-for-service payment
system. Finally, the integration of medical and dental funding is critical in

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CHALLENGES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM
Public health
Clinical care
FIGURE 7-2 Risk status and range of clinical interventions along the health care
continuum.
SOURCE: Amundson, 2009.
the context of shared risk, and more improvements are needed for efficiency
e 7-2 imagend effectiveness in thearrows isof oral health care services.
a and text between delivery fixed
Discussion
In response to a question about HealthPartners’ ability to get medicine
and dentistry to work together in clinics, Amundson responded that the
programs have been various and variable. He noted that there have been
successful projects to identify high-risk children in the pediatrics depart-
ment. Amundson added the presence of both medical and dental electronic
health records has been of great benefit to patients, but the current eco-
nomic environment of health care makes it difficult to get attention on
integrating across areas of practice.

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THE U.S. ORAL HEALTH WORKFORCE
CHALLENGES IN QUALITY ASSESSMENT IN PRIVATE PRACTICE
James D. Bader, D.D.S., M.P.H.
Uniersity of North Carolina
Quality assessment in dental care may be defined as the evaluation
of patient care provided by a dental care plan or delivery system for the
purposes of comparing one plan or system to another. Understanding the
challenges in quality assessment in dental care requires examining the
limited scope of quality assessment measures in general use for dentistry
today, exploration of why quality assessment is limited in dentistry, and
consideration of possible solutions.
Quality Assessment Measures in General Use2
No general standards exist for the quality assessment of dental care.
Today, four types of measures are generally available. First are measures
of technical excellence in individual restorations, which are applied soon
after the service is performed and are not strongly associated with long-term
outcomes. The collection of data for these measures is labor intensive and
expensive. In addition, the criteria for judgment of technical excellence tend
to be subjective and therefore make standardization and comparison dif-
ficult. A second set of measures are measures of patient satisfaction. While
many patient satisfaction instruments exist, most are psychometrically
weak, tend to be applied to biased samples (i.e., long-term patients), and
are difficult to compare. These survey instruments also tend to be very short
and are imprecise at determining the source of expressed dissatisfaction.
A third type of available measures is measures of service use (i.e., pro-
cedures). These measures may be used to answer specific access questions,
such as the proportion of a population that receives a dental service or to
determine individual styles of practice for purposes of comparison. These
measures may also be used to evaluate adherence to evidence-based treat-
ment guidelines; however, few guidelines exist. Service use measures may
be used to determine outliers of service providers, but since diagnostic infor-
mation is not inherent in service use measures, effectiveness of treatment
cannot be evaluated. Even the comparison of two practitioners is difficult
because the service use measures need to be risk adjusted for the possible
differences in the patient populations being compared, but there are no
well-accepted case mix adjustors in dentistry.
2 A variety of specialized delivery systems have superior administrative data systems and
can do more assessment than the typical private practice. However, this section focuses on the
private practice system of dentistry.

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CHALLENGES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM
The last group of measures in general use in private practice today
includes structure and process measures (aside from service use measures).
These measures are generally determined in the context of accreditation of a
plan or practice. Structural measures include evaluations of facilities, equip-
ment, and personnel administration. While these are considered to reflect
good practice and may have some basis in regulation (e.g., shielding around
X-ray equipment), very little evidence supports their relative importance to
specific treatment outcomes other than protection of patient health. Process
measures include assessment of such functions as infection control, imaging,
diagnosis, and treatment planning. Again, very little evidence supports the
importance of these measures to the outcomes of care, but they are assumed
to reflect good practice.
Overall, quality assessment in dentistry today is relatively weak, and
does not assess either the appropriateness or effectiveness of care. The only
clinical outcome measure is technical excellence, which is not related to
long-term outcomes. The only patient-oriented outcome measured is patient
satisfaction, which is inherently flawed and unable to effectively compare
delivery systems.
Reasons for Limited Performance of Quality Assessment
In part, quality assessment for dentistry is limited due to some of the
typical characteristics of traditional dental practice. First is the absence of
diagnosis codes. The introduction of coding systems in and of itself would
be challenging due to the existing technological infrastructure and propri-
etary concerns, yet only with these codes can outcomes of treatments for
specific conditions be accurately determined. Second, the dental profession
sprang from an apprentice-based movement and in the past has been con-
cerned almost exclusively with extremely short-term outcomes such as pain
relief and technical excellence, at the expense of concern over longer-term
outcomes. In addition, dentists have traditionally practiced in professional
isolation, which leads to a stronger sense of autonomy, together with lim-
ited opportunities for comparison to the outcomes of other practitioners
and alternative treatments.
Quality assessment in dentistry is also limited due to the absence of
a strong evidence base for most dental treatments and therefore, a lack
of evidence-based guidelines. Dental research is challenged in part by the
lack of the financial resources needed to perform expensive clinical trials.
In addition, because of the typical practice design, it can be difficult to
obtain outcomes data due to the need to gather data from multiple prac-
tices through chart extraction. In fact, the majority of systematic reviews
reported to date have been unable to provide unequivocal answers to the
research questions. These challenges combined with organizational resis-

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4 THE U.S. ORAL HEALTH WORKFORCE
tance lends to a vicious cycle as the lack of evidence-based guidelines causes
dentists to rely on expert opinion, reinforcing the tradition of autonomy.
However, many dental specialty societies have embraced the development
of evidence-based guidelines.
Potential New Measures
To consider new measures of quality, one needs to redefine quality
assessment as the evaluation of the outcomes of patient care provided by a
dental plan or dental care delivery system. Under this definition, three sets
of measures could be rapidly introduced to improve quality assessment in
dentistry: patient experience measures, oral health-related quality-of-life
measures, and effectiveness of care measures. First, under patient experi-
ence measures, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality developed
Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Provider Systems (CAHPS) measures,
a standardized set of survey instruments that includes a dental plan survey.
This survey asks the patient about his or her regular dentist (e.g., does
the dentist provide explanations for the care, listen to the patient, show
respect), about the care received (e.g., waiting time, presence of emergency
access), and about the dental plan itself (e.g., customer service, comprehen-
siveness of coverage, breadth of choice). The CAHPS plan survey is ready
to be used immediately in dentistry.
Second, there are a few well-developed sets of measures that can be
used to evaluate oral-health related quality of life, such as the Oral Health
Quality of Life and the Oral Health Impact Profile. These measure sets have
been validated with reasonably good associations between score levels and
other clinical indicators of oral health. These instruments have also been
specifically adapted for special populations including young children and
geriatric patients. Therefore, entire populations may be examined longitu-
dinally to see the effect dental care plans have on outcomes.
Finally, for several years, measures have been available to look at the
effectiveness of care. These measures are risk adjustable, population-based,
patient-centered, and modeled after accepted Healthcare Effectiveness Data
Information Set measures. Four basic outcomes measures examine out-
comes associated with dental caries and periodontal disease for a reporting
year, including the percent of enrollees in a plan or practice that experience
new caries or the loss of one or more teeth and the percent of enrollees
experiencing improvement or deterioration in periodontal health. In addi-
tion, three evidence-based process measures address the practice’s or care
plan’s emphasis on prevention and maintenance of oral health by examin-
ing the percentage of enrollees receiving a disease assessment (for caries
and periodontal disease), the proportion of those who are at risk for car-
ies receiving appropriate preventive therapy, and the proportion of those

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CHALLENGES OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM
who have periodontal disease receiving appropriate maintenance therapy.
These measures may be applied to separate groups and stratified by level
of disease in order to perform risk-adjusted comparisons. Several elements
are needed in order to use all these measures, including an administrative
data system, diagnostic codes, and periodontal probing information (or
surrogate measures that can be approximated via chart audits).
Conclusions
True quality assessment will not happen until the dental professions
fully adopt diagnostic codes. As the value of dental care is becoming an
increasingly important concept, purchasers need to demand proof of value
and design care benefit plans around existing practice guidelines. More
outcomes research is needed because without evidence, practice guidelines
cannot be established.
Discussion
In response to questions about the value of an electronic dental record
in quality assessment, Bader said a properly designed electronic patient
record that records diagnoses could automatically generate practitioner
or plan-level performance measures. The record, he said, would provide
information on outcomes and appropriateness since the diagnosis could be
compared to the chosen treatment. Bader noted that firms are starting to
recruit dental offices to submit the entire contents of their electronic record
systems each evening in return for practice analysis feedback. This will
eventually enable a large-scale assessment of the quality of practice, he said,
but the growth toward electronic records has been very slow.